(CM 1145) Rubric

     This may seem like a stupid and pointless topic, but in my opinion it is extremely important. The CM 1145 Rubric is more than a piece of paper with a grade on it; it is a teacher. It displays your strengths and weaknesses and shows you the areas you need to work on, just like a teacher would. It contains a list of criteria that must be met in your assignment, this includes: form, sentence structure, grammar, punctuation, thesis statement, transitions, etc. To the right of this list there are five categories that express how well you displayed each criterion. On a scale of one to five, one would be poor, two would be fair, three would be satisfactory, four would be strong, and five would be excellent. This allows you to see which areas you excelled in and which ones you lacked in. For example, on one of my assignments I received a five for my style and tone, but I also received a three for my punctuation. This told me that punctuation was an area that I needed to spend more time on. If it wasn’t for the rubric, I wouldn’t have known that.

     Your overall mark is also listed on this sheet, as well as the teachers overall opinion of the assignment and suggestions on how to improve. This is incredibly useful because during your next assignment you can focus more on those areas and hopefully receive a better mark. In high school when I would write essays, the teacher would just make comments throughout the paper and on the final page they would write our grade. Personally, I don’t think this teaches students anything. They need to be able to see where they went wrong so they can fix their mistakes. This is part of the writing process, “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”. Without the rubric, students wouldn’t know which areas to try again, therefore they would not succeed. 

This is not true at all! Here is a list of benefits from using a rubric:

• assists teachers in being fair, accurate, and consistent in their marking
• helps teachers define excellence and plan instruction so students can achieve it
• aligns curriculum objectives and evaluation  
• it creates consistent expectations for students among teachers in a school
• clarifies the teachers expectations
• supplies the student with feedback on how to improve

The only disadvantage that I can think of is that the creation of a rubric takes time. But I ask this question, should time be the reason a student doesn't succeed?